Remember back to your freshman year in college and you took that required Introduction to Psychology course? Remember learning about Maslow’s Hierarchy of human Needs? If technology (or more-specifically identity and access management) were mapped to Maslow’s pyramid, Governance would be at the apex.

Governance is the “self-actualization” of the IAM world. In other words, everything we do should be leading to governance, and failure to satisfy lower levels of the pyramid actually prevents full maturity and success. And that’s why governance is so elusive, many of the more tactical activities required to give people access to the stuff they need to do their jobs – things like passwords, authentication, and provisioning – all influence the ability to get to governance. Put simply, you can spend all your time doing things, but if you don’t do those things right you are destined for failure.

But you can’t avoid governance. Compliance won’t allow it. The business can’t survive with the risk associated with a lack of it. And it’s simply the right thing to do for you and for the people that write your paychecks. You’re not alone. Many, many organizations struggle to achieve governance, but a growing number are actually doing it. There is hope.

I’ve written a new eBook called Governance the Elusive Last Mile of IAM, in this eBook I draw on years of real-world experience and numerous governance successes and failures to come to a process and strategy that can help your governance project to be one of the lucky ones – the ones that actually do get it right.